Romney's Digital Director on Data, Digital Advertising, and The Final Stretch

It’s digital crunch time for both the Obama and Romney campaigns. Early voting and absentee ballots will ensure that, by the time election day comes around, a significant amount of votes will already be in. If the campaigns are going to turn their millions of Facebook and Twitter followers (and countless more digital ad viewers) into votes, the time is now.

In a conversation with Voted Up, Mitt Romney’s digital director, Zac Moffatt, explained how the campaign’s digital strategy is different now from earlier in the campaign, and also gave some candid thoughts about the campaign’s use of data in its digital advertising and email efforts.

As it turns out, data plays a central role for the Romney campaign. Moffatt consistently went back to this theme, telling us decisions were made based off of numbers, not feelings. “The goal of this digital department is to be the best digital department to help win an election,” he said, “not to make pretty pictures and tell everyone how smart we are.”

Does the campaign’s digital strategy change as you get closer to election day?

For sure. Early on in the process, and obviously ours is a little convoluted because we had to get through a primary, you’re doing a lot of list building and fundraising. In the final 30 days, we move heavily into mobilization and persuasion. Mobilization is someone we believe is already with us and we want them to turn out, persuasion are people who probably feel like they need to learn a little bit more about the gov. That’s probably the largest single change. It impacts the type of advertising units that you’re running, the end goals for each of those units and what you’re looking to achieve as a result.

How important is targeted advertising to achieving your goals, and what types of data do you use?

We feel like targeting is what gives us the biggest lead that we have in this. It’s what allows us to have less dollars, and be more efficient. We made a determination in the campaign 18 months ago to centralize everything of our online ad buy on a single Data Management Platform. That DMP powers all of our online advertising decisions so we have consistency across every vertical when we’re doing advertising. So, when we’re pushing something, it is consistent whether it’s on Yahoo! or AOL or MSN, all of it. That is a point of distinction. When we go to a network and buy from them, we use our tags to identify our audience. We’re not buying sites, we’re buying audiences. I know we buy from the same networks sometimes as the Obama folks, but we provide the data we want to be targeting off and I know they tend to buy more based upon the network’s targeting platform.

Is there a certain ad unit that you prefer to buy? For instance, do you like display banners or video better?

I don’t think that display is how you really drive a message. If people thought that, then people would create TV spots that stood in place for 30 seconds.

There has been some grumbling about both campaigns’ email marketing. Do you have best practices or data to back up what you’re doing with email?

I think it would be fair to say that if I didn’t think it was working we wouldn’t be doing it. I’m not going to pull the curtain back on what we’re doing, but I understand that when you’re sitting on the outside with no internal knowledge of what we’re seeing, I could see where you could make assumptions. But I don’t really think that we need to justify how we’re running our email program. We’re doing what we feel is necessary to be successful. We see all the numbers. We don’t make determinations based upon our gut, which way the wind is blowing that day — we make it based upon data, and our data is telling us what’s working. If someone feels like they don’t like the way their email program is working, it’s very simple to unsubscribe at the bottom of it. We see nothing but increased engagement, both in open rates and people responding to every email that we sent. We feel that it’s working.

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